


Hina Matsuri

by recrudescence



Category: Kill Bill
Genre: F/F, Stockholm Syndrome, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2007
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-25
Updated: 2007-12-25
Packaged: 2017-11-04 03:15:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/389107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recrudescence/pseuds/recrudescence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gogo wasn't born a sadistic, psychotic schoolgirl.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hina Matsuri

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fallofrain](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Fallofrain).



> Written as a Yuletide treat for fallofrain, who wanted O-Ren and Gogo.

 

 

The Arakaki household: bulging with the usual arsenal of servants and guards; other than that, just the girl and her father in a huge opulent house. Eight years old, tutors for everything from martial arts to ballet to cello lessons.

In retrospect, she knows she was no different than a million other privileged children.

No one ever told her so, but she assumes her father was a cog in some massive mess of grinding gears run by sword-limbed shadows in oil-sleek suits. She would be going on a trip, she'd been told, going to be a big help, and if the words sounded hollow in the air she hadn't been able to tell the difference. Her father didn't normally have time for conversation and he certainly never had time for questions. Etsuko kept her mouth shut and her eyes open and understood nothing. 

She was presented in the foyer as if for a dance recital, to an audience that stood standing and impassive before registering its complaints spectacularly.

Her father had a katana through his chest and Etsuko, huddled under the piano, was too terrified to cry. She would remember later it was the first time she'd seen him in weeks.

She would remember, far more vividly, a woman with a dark oilspill of hair, standing as rigidly as a rail. Eyes blazing, pink lips parted around a roar: _You don't do it in front of her._

**

Tokyo is a filigree sphere, woven over with wires and cables as bright and tangled as bows on a birthday present. Making one little rich girl disappear is as easy as flicking a switch.

**

Etsuko bites and bawls and the lady just sips her tea and watches mildly. 

One week in, the lady waves a hand and Etsuko unthinkingly stops in mid-yell. Etsuko glares, but can't do anything but agree when that demure pink mouth opens again. _It's unfortunate your father never trusted you to think for yourself_. She smiles and says her name is O-Ren.

**

O-Ren keeps Etsuko fed, keeps her clothes clean and her room immaculate in this strange new five-star prison. O-Ren keeps half a dozen black-clad men there to monitor Etsuko's every move. 

They don't hurt her--not maliciously. It becomes a game. She goes at one of the guards and he floors her in no time flat. It stuns her the first time, but eventually it's better than any martial arts class she's ever taken and far more productive than flinging herself at the windowless walls till she's bruised and weeping. 

One of them hands her a sword, as a joke. A giggle slips out of her mouth and barks of laughter die in the five other men's throats as the sixth one's gapes and gushes red, red pools onto the carpet.

That evening, O-Ren lets her out for the first time.

**

They've been calling her a new name as strange and dark as nightfall. She learns to answer to it while Etsuko is somewhere doing her homework in a gilt cave of a classroom in some elite private school, being driven around in dark gleaming cars by men in dark gleaming glasses who never call her by name.

Everybody knows her name now.

For a long time, she isn't allowed to watch TV unless the guards permit it--she caught her picture on the news once, early on, when they thought she wasn't looking--but now the guards have gone altogether and she comes and goes as she pleases. As O-Ren pleases. It's all the same.

**

She's met one of the others. Half-blind Elle with her mustard-yellow hair, ketchup-red lips, fuzzy-fussy handbags like an overgrown _kogal_ , trying and failing to overcompensate for missing an eye. Gogo hadn't been impressed.

"You don't have the guts to be in a relationship," the visitor is saying now, a shadow on the shoji. Gogo, vigilant and puffed with pride at being chosen to come along, can't see her but she can hear every word. 

Black Mamba, as far as Gogo is concerned, is too romantic for this line of duty. It gets boring, hearing what she has to say. The woman apparently sees O-Ren as some aloof ice queen, stunted by her bloody childhood. 

"I found," O-Ren says deliberately, "the most exquisite little thing. Just twelve years old." 

"You're _sick_ ," goes Black Mamba, as if she's any better. 

"But I'm the best." O-Ren smiles; Gogo doesn't need to see it to know it, and she stands a little straighter. "Who's in _your_ entourage, Rabbit?" 

No one but a flower girl, Gogo bets. 

**

Eventually, Gogo needs a bra since she's outgrown her others. Something strange starts happening inside her plain cotton underwear when O-Ren has her slip off her blouse. O-Ren measures her as clinically and honorably as a professional, and Gogo knows she could have easily hired a tailor to do so.

_It's a shame he never let you think for yourself._

**

"Loyalty," O-Ren has said. "Strength. These are what empires are built on." Gogo lifts her chin because she's a part of that. A big one. 

Etsuko, once, had giggled with friends about older girls who sold their panties for pocket money. Gogo, for a lark, sometimes steps into the _burusera_ shops that reek of dirty laundry and girls' locker rooms. Boldly meets the proprietor's beady eyes, says sweetly that she needs cash to buy a Prada purse. She learns a few things from this--one, that watching a person's eyes steadily go bulged and bloodshot is enthralling, and two, that panties are not the most efficacious tool for strangulation.

Sofie, with her high cheekbones and sleek chignons, discreetly looks through her long eyelashes with approval as Gogo says she wants a chain.

**

Gogo gets what she wants these days.

People look at her with _respect_. She's never had respect before, not for anything but being the daughter she was, the daughter she can scarcely recall. Her father working all the time, leaving her with housekeepers and nannies, always an expensive pile of gifts on her birthday but never a smile for any occasion. All trash, all worthless.

Etsuko and Gogo both excelled in their respective courses of study, but neither of them have ever heard of Stockholm Syndrome.

**

She goes through a phase.

Bored-eyed, slipping into dance clubs insouciantly cracking her gum, leaving her shirt untucked and only the topmost button fastened, baring a slim smooth stomach and a few inches of skirt. _I did not raise you for this_ , O-Ren reprimands her. _Please do not prove me wrong_. 

Gogo finds a happy medium. She flirts as well as she knows how, discovers that talking about wanting to be a _gravure_ idol unfailingly draws a crowd. She lets a boy take her to the movies and leaves him in the back row with a dart through his neck, hones her skills in both areas at once.

Etsuko in uniform with nothing but trust emanating from every particle. All trash, all worthless.

She can wear her skirt shorter and skip through the streets and kill a man three times her size without batting an eye. It's beautiful. O-Ren strokes her hair as if she's a kitten and says so, and it never occurs to Gogo to question her.

**

 _He was a coward who would have given you away, let us do with you what we pleased. Don't ever let anyone give you away. Be on your toes, be smart, be ready. Don't ever blindly wander into anything._

Three, six, nine years ago, Etsuko penning an essay for school with her hair in braids and every door to her heart flung wide, wide open. 

Gogo is so much smarter now. Never would have been this smart otherwise, this capable, this _good_. Any chance to kill or defend is a chance to showcase that. Miki and Johnny and O-Ren's steel-heeled army, they eye her askance and treat her well, like she deserves, and she laps it up.

Some university-aged Yakuza neophyte, fresh-faced and giddy at his own shred of power, calling, "Hey Gogo, you turn eighteen soon, right?" and laughing like an idiot until she pinned his designer coat to the wall with a throwing axe. It may be the age of consent in Tokyo, but it's open to interpretation for all anyone cares.

Sofie, prattling away on her phone, demurely sets it aside to laugh. O-Ren's hand, rising out of the wide white wing of her kimono, smothers a smile. Gogo sits back down, not a hair out of place, and sips her tea.

 


End file.
